“... who could, nevertheless, sing like angels. What of them? I never met or saw Britten, though he and Peter Pears came disastrously to Beyond the Fringe sometime in 1961. Included in the programme was a parody of Britten written by Dudley Moore, in which he sang and accompanied himself in ‘Little Miss Muffet’ done in a Pears and Britten-like way. I’m not ...”

“... And he was broke. He was living what Stevens and Swan call ‘an almost feral life’ when he met Peter Lacy. Lacy was handsome, six years younger than Bacon and played the piano in nightclubs. He ‘had no interest in the literary or art world,’ Stevens and Swan write. ‘He did not conceal his dislike for Bacon’s paintings. In fact, his indifference ...”

“... fundamental shift in perceptions must be underway. Other commentators were even more outspoken. Peter Jenkins in the Independent described the law as ‘an enemy of justice’. He went on: Plainly, after what has happened, radical changes are required in the whole system of police interrogation and in the law relating to confessions. But not only that, the ...”

“... who have done the best work on her project have been former students, including Howard Caygill and Peter Osborne, who together now teach at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University. (Gilroy too was Rose’s student before he moved to Stuart Hall in Birmingham. She was a ‘great’ teacher, he has said, and he followed her ...”

“... 953168 5Food Policy: Integrating Health, Environment and Society by Tim Lang, David Barling and Martin Caraher.Oxford, 320 pp., £32.95, March 2009, 978 0 19 856788 2The Memoirs of the Rt Hon the Earl of Woolton.Cassell, 452 pp., 1959Eating: What We Eat and Why It Matters by Peter Singer and Jim Mason.Arrow, 400 ...”

“... the largest 20 US contractors had been reduced to four: Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. Their sales now account for $150 billion, and they control a vast proportion of state contracts. Net profit in the sector, as a share of the total net profit of the Fortune 500, doubled (to 10 per cent) between 1965 and 1985. This ...”

“... Liverpool Street Station, transformed between 1985 and 1991 into one of those termini where, as Martin Amis sneered a few years later in The Information, the trains have become an awkward adjunct to the business of retail and catering. ‘The old Liverpool Street,’ Bradley counters, ‘was a dirty, baffling place’: The 1991 incarnation with its ...”

“... Paymasters held to ransom. ‘That was exactly the plan,’ Livingstone told his audience at St Martin-in-the-Fields. ‘It has gone absolutely perfectly.’ In boroughs affected by this 2012 game-show rabies – long-established businesses closed down, travellers expelled from edgeland settlements, allotment holders turned out – there were ...”

“... and market reform is questionable.’ A robuster brand of optimism was expressed by the late Martin Malia. Author of The Soviet Tragedy – a passionate requisitory of Bolshevism from the liberal right, ideologically parallel to François Furet’s Past of an Illusion (the two were close friends), but intellectually everything it is not, a work of ...”

“... a more overtly political play.There may have been another play early on.A one-acter?Yes, possibly.Peter Dale told me you once produced a play at Oxford, a small piece by Harold Pinter.I had started another magazine at Oxford called Tomorrow. And for its fourth issue I’d written to Pinter. He had just become prominent then, but I’d learned about him ...”

“... versions of events. She and her husband adored the old two-room private flat they rented in St Peter’s Avenue, and fought a long, bitter and unsuccessful battle with the council to prevent it and the neighbouring homes being knocked down. ‘It was a lovely house,’ she said. ‘These days they would have done them up because when you go down Columbia ...”

“... to his body as a walking lab, pills slushing against potions in his insides. Ten years earlier, Martin Amis had reviewed one of the first British documentaries about Aids for the Observer. Aids, he wrote, ‘is a visitation that makes you believe in the Devil’: With Aids … it seems to be promiscuity itself that is the cause. After a few hundred ...”

“... seek button – derangingly – every two or three seconds. Burbly soft rock, stale oldies, Dean Martin singing Christmas carols, Mexican polka music, endless mirthless ads for Petco and Wal-Mart – the full auditory wasteland of American popular culture assailed us. Shades of when we used to be girlfriends. We bickered most of the rest of the way. By the ...”

“... tech website 36Kr suggested that the company’s engineers, led by the former Tesla executive Peter Carlsson, were prevented by hubris from learning from the Chinese engineers on whose tech they depended. The article quoted a person who had worked on the enterprise from the Chinese end: ‘Europeans don’t perceive their battery industry as weak. They ...”

“... with about the same clarity that I remember the young Jane Eyre, Mary from The Secret Garden, Peter Pan and Alice. Rather less clarity, in fact, since the last four are readily available on my bookshelves and I have reacquainted myself with them quite regularly. Jennifer, I’ve merely remembered from time to time over an increasing distance of years, and ...”